ASSYRIAN MONUMENTS. 201 



cylinders with the view of throwing some light on the 

 origin of the implements and weapons used by their 

 mythical personages. 



Every action, whether of an artist, speaker, or writer, 

 has a corresponding molecular movement in the cerebral 

 grey matter of the brain of that individual. This mole- 

 cular action is the difficult part to make out, and to 

 discover what was its genesis, for the genesis of an 

 idea may be either traditional ; or it may be that 

 evolved from social surroundings, or from physical sur- 

 roundings, which again may depend on astronomical, 

 meteorological, physiological, pathological, and other 

 phenomena. 



In these investigations we have to try to put back 

 our minds ten thousand years, and look at things, 

 nature and everything else, with the brains of those 

 times. This seems almost an impossibility ; but by 

 studying the mental phenomena of to-day, we may, 

 perhaps, hope to creep back to the mental phenomena 

 of those days ; from the known to work back to the 

 unknown of past ages. 



